Every time I look at materials for this game, I'm completely bewildered by the premise and the attraction of same.

I can't figure out what it is. Are you inmates in a vast post-rational bantustan? What are you supposed to do? Why bother?

Holy crap.  I'd totally forgotten about that game.  It's, like, about Canadians isn't it?

WTF?

!i!

Well, originally, I picked it up when it first came out under the premise of 'post apocalypitic tribals, outcastes forming their own tribe'

Add a dash of the magic and mystical, an enemy that was something akin to soul vampires and poorly understood at best, and some notion that survival of the species hinged on this new tribe of outcastes tossing aside the cultural shackles that held the other tribes down and that was what I got from it.

Once the supplements came out I stopped paying attention, really. I gather it was a vastly different beast, and the entire thing was sort of some weird philosophical passion play about man's inhumanity to himself, or something....

Personally: My take of the original book: Playable, cool, with some interesting tidbits to be explored.

Of the collection of books: Untouchably wonky.

Eh, explore the world, kill otherwordly beings and take their stuff (sometimes). Doesn't seem so WTF-ish to me. Like Jorune, I think some get too caught up in the window dressing. Which is understandable. The window dressing is pretty fucking cool or needlessly complex depending on your POV.

Regards,
David R

The one thing that really keeps me from getting into the game is the miniscule text size. It takes a lot out of me.

I'm not sure where the difficulty lies, to be honest.  It's a post-apocalypse game, except with weird goddesses and demons instead of zombies or mutants.  You can do pretty much anything in Tribe 8 that you can do in any post-apoc setting.  

You do what people usually do in post-apocalypse games.  What's the point?...well, I dunno, that's for the group to figure out, I'd say.  I mean, what's the point in Call of Cthulhu or All Flesh Must be Eaten or Gamma World or Midnight?

Quote from: brettmbThe one thing that really keeps me from getting into the game is the miniscule text size. It takes a lot out of me.

I only ever had the first edition, and the layout just about killed me.  Very irritating as game books - tough to find anything quickly.

Quote from: ErstwhileI only ever had the first edition, and the layout just about killed me.  Very irritating as game books - tough to find anything quickly.

I think that's the one I have. I'll have to dig it up and check.

EDIT: You're right, it's the layout that bugged me - you can't find anything. I was thinking of heavy Gear - tiny text.

Quote from: Ian AbsentiaHoly crap.  I'd totally forgotten about that game.  It's, like, about Canadians isn't it?

Even better, it's all in post-apocalyptic Montreal.  (I haven't actually played it but people here have a lot of love for it.)

Quote from: walkerpEven better, it's all in post-apocalyptic Montreal. )

that's the best kind of Montreal.  


(Funnily enough, post-apocalyptic Saskatchewan would look...a lot like pre-apocalyptic Saskatchewan, I'd imagine. :haw: )

I grew up in post apocalyptic Northern New York (Watertown). Sometimes we'd cross over to Kingston, Ontario, to see what people lived like before the Fall.

Tribe 8 is a mix of abject terror and super-chic visual style, which to this 80s person is a good working definition for one specific kind of awesome.

What you do is very simple, and that info is readily available at dp9. You start out as a member of the eighth tribe, a bunch of ragtag outcasts on the outskirts of postapoc Montreal. You help organize and liberate what other remnants of humanity made it through the concentration camps of the Z'Bri, IMHO the most reprehensible demon-things in RPG literature, and who by the way dwell not so far away from your homebase.

A year or two of weekly play and several hundred dollars later, that liberation will indeed happen. There are a number of rpg.net threads by people who played it all the way through, and they're ecstatic about the experience.

T8 has all sorts of stupid WW-isms/1990s design idiocies built into it--railroad metaplot unfolding over a dozen books, lots of faction books on top of that, setting info written as partial first-person account by interested parties, so on.

It doesn't matter. Those who've played it say there's a lot of leeway for the PCs to make their mark in the metaplot. The scattered info has been assembled into a proper third-person account in the Player's Handbook.

But the real point is that the NPCs, the locations, the maps, the adversaries are just too gripping. There is no such thing as a dull encounter in Tribe 8. No NPC is generic--you care about these people, pro or con.

As for the gameworld, there is a point at which certain settings become three-dimensional and pull you in, provided you're willing to play on their terms. From there on in, there's no such thing as a trivial side quest, either. Everything your PCs do matters, and it helps of course that Vimary is such a small and intense place. Not a whole planet, just a few hundred square miles shared by the tribes and the Z'Bri.

While some of this may sound like Glorantha and such, there's a world of difference--the difference between 1970s North Cal hippies overdosing on Campbell and 1990s French graphic novels overdosing on stylish weirdness. Those two universes are just not in communication.

I know you're not exactly a 70s hippie, El, but I don't think even at second glance you'd like T8 one little bit.

Awesome! I mean, it's just what I thought it was. If I had the time, I might get on the train with someone else driving it, but as things stand I think I'll wait for the movie.

Quote from: Elliot WilenI can't figure out what it is. Are you inmates in a vast post-rational bantustan? What are you supposed to do? Why bother?

You are supposed to change things and you can in that setting.

One of the biggest problems people seemed to have early on, curiously enough, was with the idea of a barter economy.  Some of the early supplements started creeping toward money with the introduction of medallions and such.  That's how I wound up writing the Economics essay that was published in the Tribe 8 Companion.  I wanted to save the barter idea by making it workable for people, which I did in part by listing some of the things they might trade.  And what's interesting about both of the essays that I wrote is that despite all of the talk of mythology and arcs and so on in the game, my essays were written to support a die-hard world-based perspective to help explain how things might actually work in the setting.

that's not that interesting John. In fact, in most cases the weirder or more mythic something is, the more grounded in reality the things around it or supporting it have to be.

Which I suppose is interesting in and of itself, but in support of your essays makes their grounding make perfect, and predictable, sense.